Today I’m officially involved for 4 years in Icinga, joined the team on 15.5.2009 🙂
Starting as IDOUtils Developer for Oracle, I’ve taken over the leadership on the Icinga Core Development soon after. Basically since I am the Core Release Manager too – starting with 0.8.3 release back in late 2009 (when I added Postgresql support to IDOUtils).
While using Icinga at my previous work, I’ve also learnt how to deal with RPM packaging. Which is why you’ll find my name in spec files all around the Icinga ecosystem.
You’ll find me in various community channels, doing free support alongside – learning and getting feedback on how to improve Icinga. Accompanied by other Icinga team members, of course. Icinga became like family, especially when we meet on events and conferences. Some things happen hidden from the public domain, so even if there seems to be not much activity, there still is.
Alongside my involvement in Icinga, I’m also passionate about writing documentation and wiki howtos. The Icinga wiki contains a heck of pages written by myself, but also those I’ve worked for already appreciate it. Another passion is keeping the monitoring portal alive, answering questions I do not even know an answer yet as well as doing some moderation tasks like moving threads around. This is was the primary source in order to fully understand how Nagios/Icinga Core works and what people actually demand when having a complex monitoring setup.
So when Gunnar approached me with Icinga2, I feel the need to keep it altogether – keep existing Icinga 1.x development kicking, preparing a clean migration path as well as making Icinga2 the best tool in the world. Including all the feedback and ideas I’ve gathered in the past. And sometimes, ideas are running into 1.x again. Same as when developing Classic UI and Icinga Web. In the past, I was more involved in Classic UI (before Ricardo took over doing a magnificent job). Support for display_name was my first feature patch e.g. – since Nagios never implemented it, pretty good idea to become more special.
Well, and for the Nagios part – they’ve blocked my mail addresses on their mailinglists, deleted my account on their bug tracker, and even deleted the Icinga team as origin for patches I’ve sent them. Last year I decided that those childish people can rot in hell, and wrote a summary answer to the Nagios vs Icinga story. The future is so bright, and we will overcome the shortcomings of the fork from Nagios. The Icinga community is getting stronger and larger even, so why look back anyways.
My personal interest in a yet better Icinga development as well as working with Icinga in large scale setups brought me to a life decision – goodbye Vienna, hello Nuremberg. In the past, I’ve been talking with the guys at Netways a lot, we even had our half-a-year meetup next to the conferences. But it wasn’t enough, I wanted to do more than that. So I left little Austria, and started from scratch in little big Germany. The rumors about EU and easy are all wrong, but ever since it got sorted, you’ll find me even more involved in the Icinga ecosystem – e.g. for Netways addons, plugins. I’ve even seen and built enterprise scale Icinga systems which I would have never seen just by community support. Even further, I’ve already used my knowledge on RPM packaging for customers, pushing everything back upstream mostly. There’s even space for more people, like another guy from Austria recently joined Netways 🙂
To note – work is a dedication. Especially for me as workaholic. But work does not change my personal opinion on things. And there’s plenty of spare time I still invest into Icinga – like 1.9 was primarily hacking on the weekend. Though, I would appreciate more devs to join team Icinga so that I could lean a little back. But, wait, someone said Icinga2 and Q4 2013? F*ck 😉
So, make sure to join me at OSMC 2013 – we’ll bring Icinga 1.10 and Icinga2, and you can bring beer 😀 Or stop by sooner in lovely Nuremberg for coffee or beer or whatever 🙂